One cell, one tomogram! Our montage tomography workflow, MOSAIC, is out in Structure, and MontageMaker is on GitHub! MOSAIC: www.cell.com/structure/fu... MontageMaker: github.com/MPI-Dortmund... Big thanks to @maikaboiero.bsky.social, Adriana Prajica, Gavin Rice, and @raunser-lab.bsky.social!
Utz Ermel
@uermel.bsky.social
Scientist at bi[o]hub, Redwood City, CA I like to make open source cryoET things.
With Cryo-ET/EM, the macromolecules we study (and biological questions we ask) are SNR-limited. Here, we share Nilas, a low-voltage milling method named after thin sea ice. Nilas produces thin (sub 50 nm in places!), minimally damaged lamellae. biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.21.739890v1
Optimized cryo-FIB milling strategy to generate thin, minimally damaged biological lamellae
Focused ion beam (FIB)-milling has been adapted to thin frozen cells for visualization of macromolecular structures in situ with cryogenic electron microscopy. However, only a few large and abundant c...
biorxiv.org
Learn about a device that boosts the contrast in electron microscopy using the most intense laser beam yet made, and the story of its path from an idea to an invention that could open new lines of inquiry in structural biology and biochemistry. #chemsky 🧪
Uncovered: Record-setting laser boosts cryo-electron microscopy
Phase-contrast device could allow in-cell proteomics
cen.acs.org
My personal summer of code continues with another ChimeraX plugin - this time, MorphometricsX! Load quantified meshes from morphometrics (or pycurv) in ChimeraX with color-by-quantification and display alongside tomos and particles. Coming to the toolshed soon! #teamtomo github.com/baradlab/mor...
🚨Open call to the Cell Tracking crowd out there🚨! Loïc's team at @biohub.org opened our Kaggle Challenge for 3D cell tracking, with $60k of prize money💰. Spread the news, delve into our gigabytes of imaging (zarr3) and cell tracking (geff) data of developing zebrafish embryos, and start tracking 🤩
1/ 🧬🔬 How does one cell become an entire animal? We can now film it in 3D 🐟, but turning those movies into accurate cell tracks is brutally hard. Enter our new #Kaggle challenge: $60K prize pool, to help crack 3D+time cell tracking at scale! 🧵👇 www.kaggle.com/competitions... @biohub.org
From v0.2.0 MissAlignment now has an inference mode where you can apply the trained models from one dataset to a new dataset to skip training time. I haven't tested it extensively, so double check if the results look decent 😉 The program calls changed slightly, see here: github.com/warpem/miss-...
github.com
Inspired by Utz, I ported the old Briggs lab tools to ChimeraX in a single bundle named Geopickr, with some extra utilities (geopicking on morphometrics surfaces!). I've submitted it to the toolshed, but in the meantime: github.com/baradlab/Geo...
Claude Code is pretty good at writing ChimeraX plugins! This one is almost entirely good context and some prompting: github.com/uermel/chime... Most likely older plugins could be ported over that way relatively easily.
Cryo-ET gives unparalleled views of cellular structures, but targeted sample preparation by cryo-FIB milling has been a constraint. No longer! A new workflow yields close to 100% targeting success for centrioles & other small structures. Read the preprint ⤵️ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
In a series of 3 papers and preprints, we’re thrilled to share with you the working laser phase plate. In collaboration with research led by Holger Müller at UC Berkeley, this is a huge innovation in imaging to make small and faint objects inside cells visible. bit.ly/4vK9LVn
Excited to see POPSICLE out! 🍦 A combined benchmark for cryoET and evaluations with common segmentation models. Find the full dataset here: huggingface.co/datasets/bio...
Schwartz, Ermel, Owens, Zhao, Peck, Hart, Jensen, Carragher, Kimanius: POPSICLE: Benchmark Datasets for Segmentation and Localization in CryoET https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10255 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.10255 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.10255
We have published a review on how contextual information can complement and enhance research using #cryoET . www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Context matters: A view on metadata analysis in cryo-electron tomography
Cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) enables the analysis of biological samples in situ, revealing the complex interplay that shapes (sub)cellular archi…
sciencedirect.com
Proteins are the machinery of life. Billions of their sequences have been cataloged—but the biology behind most is still unknown. Today we're releasing ESMFold2, ESMC and ESM Atlas to help change that. Open source, open to every scientist. biohub.ai/esm/protein
We're happy to announce our new preprint! 🐸 easymode: general pretrained networks for cellular cryo-ET. Segment ~20 cellular features – ribosomes, microtubules, mitochondria, nuclei & more – with zero model training. 🔗 doi.org/10.64898/202... 🧵👇
Volumetric exploration of multi-resolution CryoET data in native WebGPU. Kiln (0.3.0) adds float32 support, OME-Zarr v0.4, slice views and more. github.com/MPanknin/kil... Vibrio cholerae tomogram from CryoET Data Portal. cryoetdataportal.czscience.com #WebGPU #OME-Zarr #CryoET
Easymode: general pretrained networks for cellular cryo-ET enable flexible approaches to subtomogram averaging www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.19.726344v1 #cryoEM
Thanks to @uermel.bsky.social from the @biohub.org for helping me upload my unpublished tomograms from my time at Caltech. FIB milled and cryosectionned Arabidopsis cells and Pollen tubes (thread 🧵).
Hello World :) Join us in building foundational subcellular spatial intelligence. To get this party started, we are pleased to announce inaugural call for Subspatial x DECTRIS CLOUD fellowships, apply at subspatial.org/fellowship #subspatial #fellowships #openscience #teamtomo #spatialbiology
subspatial.org
Today we're announcing the Virtual Biology Initiative—a major new commitment to build the data foundation biology needs to power the next generation of AI models. Next-gen imaging. Molecular engineering tools. Open data infrastructure for the entire scientific community. Read more: bit.ly/3ONTkHO
Biohub launches the Virtual Biology Initiative
A $500M commitment to galvanize a global, open-data effort to build predictive models of the human cell.
bit.ly
Preprint 🧵! I’m really excited to introduce BIGSMALL, an interleaved multi-magnification cryo-ET scheme bridging molecular and cellular scales in a single acquisition! BIGSMALL = 𝐁road 𝐈nformation 𝐆athering 𝐒trategy by 𝐌ultiscale 𝐀cquisition of lame𝐋𝐋a www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... (1/6)
Excited to share our paper on the NLRP3 inflammasome condensate at the Microtubule Organizing Center (MTOC) by "precise!" cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET), in collaboration with Jue (phyllis) Wang in the labs of Grant Jensen (BYU) and Pete Dahlberg (Stanford)! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Excited to share our paper about copick, a dataset API and toolkit for collaborative annotation and analysis of #cryoET data! Whether you're picking particles or curating segmentations, copick reduces friction and brings #OME-Zarr to cryoET without breaking pipelines. 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1002/pro.70578
#UMAP in VR for #3DThursday! In this zebrafish embryogenesis dataset, RNA-seq + ATAC-seq across 94k+ cells reveal changing regulatory programs over time. 🥼 Yang-Joon Kim, Loic Royer @loicaroyer.bsky.social , Matthias Haury 📝 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🏛️ Biohub @biohub.org 🎬 #syGlass v2.6.0
New Title Alert: easymode- a collection of general pretrained networks for cellular cryoET. Learn more here: buff.ly/mLbcUbZ #SBGrid #SBGridSoftware
easymode
buff.ly
Streaming OME-Zarr data directly into syGlass for #3DThursday🌍🔬 With #syGlass v2.6.0, datasets can stream from disk, S3, or HTTPS with no massive downloads required. Huge thanks to the community building open imaging standards: @openmicroscopy.org #OMEZarr #Microscopy #OpenScience #Bioimaging
New on the CryoET Data Portal: ~27,000 tomograms of affinity-captured lysosomes from HEK293T cells across 4 physiological states. Includes raw data, AreTomo3 reconstructions & Membrain-Seg annotations. Openly available for reuse! cryoetdataportal.czscience.com/depositions/...
This one was quite the journey! The paper describing the #ChlamyDataset is finally out and on the cover of Mol Cell! This beautiful rendering made by co-author @jessheebner.bsky.social and Holly Peterson shows an instance of mitochondrial fission found in the dataset 😍 [Maybe long thread ahead]
Toward community-driven visual proteomics with large-scale cryo-electron tomography of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii
Using the latest advances in instrumentation and computational workflows, Kelley et al. present a large-scale annotated cryo-electron tomography dataset of the model green alga, Chlamydomonas reinhard...
cell.com
The latest issue is now online www.cell.com/molecular-ce...
Tired of knowing what you are looking for in your tomograms? Why not try bluesky-less Frosina's new self-supervised algorithm for semantic segmentation and particle picking for #teamtomo (includes a new denoiser without the need for odd/even tomos) Code is on GitHub if you want to try it out
CryoSiam: self-supervised representation learning for automated analysis of cryo-electron tomograms https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.11.687379v1
Hi #teamtomo! Want to use OME-Zarr for your tilt series but can't integrate it with your existing sub-tomogram averaging pipelines? Try zarr-particle-tools - RELION-style extraction & reconstruction built for OME-Zarr-based workflows! 📦 pip install zarr-particle-tools 🔗 github.com/czimagingins...
GitHub - czimaginginstitute/zarr-particle-tools: Particle extraction and reconstruction from OME-Zarr tilt series.
Particle extraction and reconstruction from OME-Zarr tilt series. - czimaginginstitute/zarr-particle-tools
github.com
Stunning cover to celebrate the incredible work from @loicaroyer.bsky.social's team. Learn more about Ultrack, a powerful tool for fast, accurate and scalable cell tracking: biohub.org/life-science... 🧪
Our November issue is now live! 🎉 www.nature.com/nmeth/volume... On the cover, cell tracking in a developing zebrafish embryo visualized using Ultrack. Cover by Alexandre Dizieux, Jordão Bragantini, Loic Royer, Merlin Lange, CZ Biohub. Paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
EvolutionaryScale will be joining forces with Biohub to create the first large-scale scientific initiative combining frontier AI & frontier biology. Together, we're building world-class compute, AI research & state-of-the-art technologies to cure or prevent disease. bit.ly/4nOUGO4
Biohub launches initiative combining frontier AI & frontier biology
The large-scale scientific effort combines frontier AI with frontier biology to accelerate discovery and solve disease.
bit.ly